In my opinion, emotional intelligence (EQ) may be the most underrated skill that people just don't give enough attention to. Engineers especially from my experience focus a lot more on intelligence and their work, but disregard EQ—even though it is a foundation for numerous important skills and "it accounts for 58 percent of performance in all types of
jobs."

Before we get deeper into it, it's import to define and understand what emotional intelligence even is. Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognize and understand emotions in yourself and others, and your ability to use this awareness to manage your behavior and relationships.

Emotional intelligence is made up of 4 main skills: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. I'll go through each one and also give a list of ways to improve those skills

Having better emotional intelligence will not only benefit your relationship with yourself (which I believe is the most important relationship), but it will also strengthen your relationships with others. To be honest, I feel like most importantly, this makes you a better human and a better person to be around.

Self-Awareness

Self-awareness is your ability to accurately understand your emotions in the moment and recognize your patterns across different situations. It means knowing what makes you tick, what you do well, and what triggers strong reactions in you. It's hard, but developing this skill requires you to sit through and think about uncomfortable feelings/emotions and understand where they come from. This is something that takes time, thought, and conscious effort but will help you so much in your personal life and in the workforce by allowing your emotions to not hold you back.

83% of top performers [in their jobs] have high self-awareness, compared to just 2% of bottom performers.

Strategies for Improving Self-Awareness

1. Don't Treat Feelings as Good or Bad: Do not judge your emotions as "good" or "bad", but rather, just notice and sit with them without judgment so they can run their course and help you understand what's really going on. For example, if you feel guilt, rather than immediately labeling it as bad and trying to get rid of it, you let yourself feel that guilt and once you understand the source, the guilt naturally fades and you can decide how to respond constructively.
2. Observe the Ripple Effect of Your Emotions: Recognize that your emotions ripple outward affect not just the immediate person you're interacting with but everyone who witnesses or is touched by that emotion. Thus, it's crucial to observe how your feelings impact others and use that awareness to choose the right thing to do. For example, when a manager berates one employee in front of the team, everyone who witnessed it feels the impact and may be scared, thus diminishing those relationships as well.
3. Lean Into Discomfort: Instead of avoiding the discomfort of seeing yourself as you really are and running from uncomfortable emotions, you need to lean into them and move through them since ignoring feelings doesn't make them disappear, it just makes them resurface unexpectedly. For example, someone who hates feeling down constantly distracts themselves with meaningless activity and never finds real contentment.

Self-Management

Self-management is your ability to use emotional awareness to direct your behavior positively. It is not just about avoiding explosive reactions in the moment, but consistently managing your tendencies over time and across different situations. The real challenge is putting your immediate needs on hold to pursue larger, more important goals, which requires ongoing commitment since these goals often take time to achieve. For example, you may be extremely frustrated at a choice your close friend made, but rather than yelling at them (immediate need), you stay calm to maintain the relationship (long-term goal). If you are not sure of any long-term goals you have, take some time to think about it and how you can reach those goals.

Improving Self-Management

Social Awareness

Social awareness is your ability to accurately pick up on other people's emotions and understand what's really going on with them, even when you don't feel the same way. This definitely is hard for a lot of people—including myself—as it requires deep, active listening and observation. That means that you have to try to stop your own internal judgement/monologue, resist the urge to plan what YOU have to say next, and just listen to what the other person has to say. Having good social awareness is super helpful in building and maintaining relationships, as well as just being a understanding, reliable person people can talk to.

Improving Social Awareness

Relationship Management

Relationship management is your ability to use the awareness of your own emotions and others' emotions to handle interactions successfully, build strong bonds over time, and communicate effectively. I think having strong connections with a variety of people is so rewarding and you can really learn and grow so much from them. This skill becomes really important during stressful times, helping you avoid both passive conflict avoidance and emotional explosions so you can navigate difficult conversations constructively instead.

Improving Relationship Management

Final Notes

Work on one skill at a time. Personally, I beleive that self-awareness is what most people should work on first, especialy since ti is a founddatio for manty of the other skills.